Free Dollarocracy by John Nichols

FOREWORD
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United States Senator Bernie Sanders
    M ore than a decade ago, in April 2002, I opened a crowded meeting at the Unitarian Church on Main Street in Montpelier, Vermont, by announcing, “I want to welcome you to what I believe is the first congressional town meeting ever organized to address the issue of corporate control of the media.” For the next several hours, John Nichols, Bob McChesney, and I had the remarkable experience of talking with and listening to citizens who were ready to engage in a serious discourse about the role of a free press in sustaining democracy. The people got it, as they almost always do. Even then, they could see what we saw: a decline in the amount and quality of journalism and a parallel rise in the influence of Big Money in our politics.
    The media reform movement that Nichols and McChesney have done so much to foster—as the authors of four books on media policy, as advocates for independent media, and as cofounders of the nation’s media reform network, Free Press—has always sought to address that concern. I’ve been proud to work with them on media issues and proud of the successes we have had in pushing back against consolidation of media ownership and in supporting public and community broadcasting and maintaining net neutrality.
    But Nichols and McChesney have always argued that realizing the full promise of a free press in America must be seen as the founders saw it: as a way of providing the information and ideas that sustain democratic discourse and enable citizens to cast informed votes. And the past decade has, unfortunately, been rough on democratic discourse and on democracy itself. Local newspapers have closed or been downsized. Coverage of statehouses and even of Washington, DC, is declining. Although there is hope for online journalism, resources are few. For tens of millions of Americans, an information voidhas developed. And it is being filled by political advertising and public relations spin.
    The simple truth is that we cannot govern our own affairs when our national, state, and local debates are bought and sold by billionaires, who use thirty-second commercials to shout down anyone who disagrees. Democracy demands a rich, robust discourse about ideas, not a spending spree that demeans those ideas, diminishes honest debate, and turns voters off to the political process. Yet this is the threat we now face. In this book, Nichols and McChesney, pioneers in explaining the relationship between media and democracy, step up to address the great challenge of our time: the replacement of democracy with what they describe as Dollarocracy.
    This is not a casually chosen term. They suggest that with the decline of independent journalism as a primary source of information about elections and governing, and its replacement by now-omnipresent political advertising, especially since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC ruling, we have seen the development of an electoral equivalent to the self-perpetuating military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about. The money-and-media election complex, producing a slurry of negative ads, spin, and obstruction, is not what the founders intended.
    That’s one reason that I was proud to introduce a Saving American Democracy amendment to the U.S. Constitution that says corporations are not persons with constitutional rights equal to real people, corporations are subject to regulation by the people, corporations may not make campaign contributions or any election expenditures, and Congress and the states have the power to regulate campaign finances. In this book, Nichols and McChesney make a powerful case for why it is necessary to amend the Constitution to tackle the Money Power that the Progressive reformers of a century ago warned would replace democracy with plutocracy.
    But they do not stop there. They recall the Progressive Era and argue that America is ripe for a new age of